Little hope of agreement on limiting global emissions

The UN's former climate change envoy holds out little hope for a post-Kyoto agreement.

The Kyoto Protocol expires next year.

A former UN special envoy on climate change believes there is little likelihood of agreement on a new deal being reached before the Kyoto Protocol expires next year.

Even if nations can find a successor to the binding agreement to curb carbon emissions, they will not be able to put it in place in time to take effect before Kyoto expires at the end of next year, said Dr Han Seung-Soo. Dr Han is also a former prime minister of South Korea who served as the UN special envoy until 2008.

Representatives of almost 200 nations are to meet in South Africa in November for the last scheduled climate talks.

"Even if we agree, it's too late," said Dr Han, who now serves on the UN's panel on global sustainability.

"No parliament will just ratify within a year. So at this juncture, frankly speaking, I'm pessimistic to see a protocol that will succeed the Kyoto Protocol."

His comments reflect a darkening outlook for international cooperation on fighting climate change.

The Kyoto Protocol was the 1997 agreement binding 40 industrialised nations to curb emissions, which many scientists believe contribute to climate change. But negotiations on a deal to replace it have been rife with disputes over who should cut emissions, how much to cut them by and even how to cut them.

"Developed countries want to have internationally legally binding pledges, whereas developing countries want domestically legally binding pledges," Dr Han said last week in Abu Dhabi. "These are totally different approaches to the problem. At this juncture there is no agreement."

Some nations have pulled their names out of any potential cooperation pact, with Canada last month joining Japan and Russia in saying it would not support extending the protocol.

The discussions to come in Durban follow talks in Cancun last year and Copenhagen the year before. Countries would have had to come together at Copenhagen for governments to ratify it in time, Dr Han said.

But the talks broke down.

Dr Han and others are now looking to Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Action, an alternative model conceived in 2007 in which countries tailor their own reduction targets and techniques.

Such a do-it-yourself approach has been the philosophy in South Korea, which has pressed ahead with ambitious targets that outpace those mandated by the Kyoto Protocol, including a 2009 measure to cut emissions by 30 per cent within the next decade.

The key is getting businesses in east Asia's fourth-biggest polluter to get behind it. South Korea, which has almost no natural energy resources, has drawn its economic growth from industries such as car manufacturing and consumer electronics.

"When we announced that, the industry reaction was not very positive. The government began to persuade them that this is in the long run to the benefit of the industry, not to the government," said Dr Han, who serves as the chairman of the Global Green Growth Institute based in Seoul that has set up an office in Abu Dhabi.

"You have to transform yourself, you have to change business practices, you have to change business models for the better. So business will become very efficient," he said.

"In the long run the business community realises that this is the way forward - not backward, forward."